


This Husband of Mine

by fallintosanity (yopumpkinhead)



Series: A Bridge Once Broken [6]
Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies), Wakfu
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-03
Updated: 2015-06-03
Packaged: 2018-04-02 15:33:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4065166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yopumpkinhead/pseuds/fallintosanity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jahanna observes Loki.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Husband of Mine

**Author's Note:**

> This story spans roughly the end of _J'entre dans la légende_ to the end of _La légende éternelle._

It took her months to learn all his smiles.

There was the bright one, when he was amused or delighted. The gleeful one, and its sister smirk, when he’d just worked a bit of mischief. There was the professional smile for when he was meeting with important guests, and if most people thought it was a genuinely happy one, she’d seen enough of both to tell the difference. There was a certain crinkle to his eyes, a tilt of his head, when he smiled and meant it.

He had ugly smiles, too. The flash of teeth that was more predator than pleasure. The flat, humorless smile that she’d learned hid pain or anger. The dark smile, full of the void that still lurked behind the scarred places of his soul.

And, rarest of all, there was his real smile. It was small and quiet, mostly in his eyes, and the only time she saw it was when they were alone, curled together in bed or standing on a high balcony, fingers twined. She loved that smile, loved the way it made him look, and she delighted in the moments when he shared it with her.

*             *             *

It took him months to learn that she wasn’t going to abandon him.

He was afraid, desperately so, now that the war was over, the Infinity Gems recovered, her place on the Eliatrope Council assured, that she would cast him aside as useless, unwanted. She tried to reassure him, through words, touch, actions, that she would never do that. She loved him - not the silver-tongued rogue, not the powerful but dangerous _seiðmaðr_ , not the pariah prince who’d saved the universe - _him_. But he didn’t believe that, _couldn’t_ believe that, not after everyone he’d thought had once loved him had abandoned him to the void.

She was glad that she had Tikalukatal, and the full powers of the Aspect of Mind, to help her through those months, because as days passed without her rejecting him, as his fear grew that it was only a matter of time, he did everything he could to drive her away first. She knew why he was doing it _(bright burning spikes of determination in his wakfu, fierce sharp belief that if he pushed her away then she couldn’t abandon him)_ , but that didn’t make it any easier to bear when he slid into a cold burning rage, when his silver tongue turned against her, when he came up with petty fits of spite.

One of his favorites, at first, was to turn blue and cold when they made love, and she hated it less for being an attempt to scare her off and more for how he believed that form was awful enough to manage it. Maybe he’d forgotten that he’d been blue the first time they’d made love, maybe he thought that once was an aberration and if he did it again she’d hate it. The first time he did it she wasn’t expecting it at all, and when she gasped in surprise at the sudden cold he couldn’t quite hide the mix of vicious glee and fierce disgust that flashed over his face _(memories forming like mist around him, monster, freak, Jotun)_.

Later she learned to watch for it, to be ready before he did it so she wouldn’t be surprised by the cold, and gradually he began to realize that she would love him no matter what skin he wore.

*             *             *

He didn’t like to ask for things.

Oh, he could make demands - he’d been raised a prince and a diplomat, after all - but mostly he managed to get people to do what he wanted without ever actually asking. He was good at it, so good that Jahanna was pretty sure she was the only one who knew he was doing it, and she couldn’t deny that it was generally effective.

But it also meant that he never quite knew what to do when someone did something for him that he hadn’t meticulously arranged.

He liked to read, tearing through the Sadidas’ royal library like an Enutrof through a treasure vault. She’d often find him sprawled in a window seat or swinging lazily in a hammock, book in hand, utterly oblivious to the world around him. And often she’d find him there still, hours and occasionally days later, having apparently not moved in the intervening time. It worried her, especially when he finally remembered to take a break and ended up eating enough food for three guardsmen.

So one afternoon, when he’d been lying on a couch in their study the whole day reading through a history of Brakmar, she collected a basket of fruits and small rolls from the kitchen (and she was glad King Sheran Sharm had finally caved to the needs of the new residents and hired a chef who could cook more than the Sadidas’ usual diet of greens) and brought it to the study. He barely looked up when she entered, and when she nudged his shoulder he sat up without taking his eyes off the book. She sat down so that he could lean back against her, and when they were settled she plucked a cherry from the basket and held it to his lips.

He ate that cherry and the next one without seeming to notice, but the third time she offered, he went abruptly tense and pushed her hand away, twisting to glare at her.

“I am not your pet,” he said, sharp-edged and angry ( _memories like ghosts around him, Jotun foundling, stolen relic, Thor’s tagalong_ ).

She met his eyes. “No,” she agreed calmly. “You are my husband, and I would very much like for you to not waste away.”

He stared at her ( _distrust a dark thread around him, spiked with the sharper colors of fear_ ). She waited, knowing that he was capable of reading the truth in her eyes once he’d calmed down enough. Gradually the ugly colors around him faded, except for a thin little line of _worry-shame-nervousness_ that she would react badly to the outburst, that she would reject him as he felt so many others had done, a fear that still hadn’t quite gone away. So she leaned in and pecked a kiss to his lips, quick and light enough that he didn’t have time to startle.

“I mean it,” she said, keeping her voice gentle. “Read all you want, but let me keep you from starving while you do it.”

He hesitated a moment longer, then snorted softly and settled down against her once more. She curled one hand around his chest, and with the other offered the cherry again.

When he ate it, absently, already wrapped right back up in what he was reading, she smiled.

*             *             *

He didn’t quite know what to do with Chibi.

She’d agreed to take the child without telling him, because she knew he’d have refused out of fear: of his own demons, of failure, of the general sort of panic to which people who have no experience with children are prone. She didn’t have anywhere near his level of skill at manipulation, but she managed it so that Chibi and Grougaloragran had already been moved into a room adjacent to theirs, and Alibert had gone back to Amakna and his inn, before he found out. He’d stood in the doorway of Chibi’s room, where the boy slept in his cradle with Grougal curled beside him, and sputtered for a few minutes before spinning angrily on one heel and stalking off to his lab.

Tikalukatal had huffed a sigh, shaken his head, and followed, transforming to his hunting bird form so that he could land on Loki’s shoulder.

She waited.

It was almost three days before he deigned to speak to her again, which would have been considerably more worrying if she hadn’t had Tikal’s frequent reports on his well-being. When he did, he said without preamble, “I can’t care for an _infant_.”

“Of course you can,” she said. Chibi was sitting on her hip, watching them with his big dark eyes, one fist stuffed in his mouth. “You do just fine with Cabotine.”

“Cabotine, I can return to her parents,” he grumbled. “This is entirely different.”

“Mm-hmm,” she said dryly. He glared, and she gave him a cheerful smile. “Besides, it’ll be good practice if we ever decide to have children.”

His reaction to that would have been hilarious - he looked utterly poleaxed - except for the memories that flared up around him ( _a tiny, scarred blue infant; a pale dark-haired child watching from behind someone’s skirts as his adoptive father raged at a small Thor; the despair as he realized his true heritage; looking up at Odin’s face as he hung over an abyss and heard his world shredded_ ). She’d worried about something like this, which was why she’d said _if_ , not _when_ , but even so she wondered if she shouldn’t have been gentler in bringing it up.

Tikalukatal, standing behind him, put a hand on his shoulder to steady him, and for a moment he leaned into the touch. The memories around him faded, suppressed once more by an effort of will, and he shook his head. “We’ll see,” he said, and stalked away.

Tikalukatal rolled his eyes and followed.

*             *             *

He got better with time and practice. He still didn’t like being left alone with Chibi, but between Jahanna, Evangelyne, Tristepin, and the various court attendants, such times were rare. More often, Jahanna would bring Chibi and Cabotine to whichever room he happened to be in, and then simply allow the children’s natural curiosity and gregariousness to push matters.

They both liked to climb into his lap and pretend to do whatever he was doing, be it reading, measuring spell ingredients, or scrawling notes in his journal. While sometimes this annoyed him, especially if he was in the middle of a big project, more often than not he clearly enjoyed showing them what he was working on. She half-suspected it was because he had never had a genuinely interested audience before, and moreover, one-year-olds would not tease him for his love of the scholarly arts. Whatever his reason, the time he spent with the children slowly began to ease his fears.

Still, there were moments of frustration. Children are grabby creatures, and Loki’s black hair, long and curling and wild, was an easy target when they sat on his lap. Several times she’d found Chibi or Cabotine unceremoniously deposited in her arms by a furious Loki with hair ragged and damp from being grabbed and chewed on. Frustration she could understand - children are also frustrating creatures - but what worried her were the memories she could see flickering around him in those moments ( _sharp Chitauri claws grabbing at him, contemptuous Midgardians shoving him, a dead-skinned hand with six fingers wrapped in his hair in a sick mockery of a caress)_.

The last thing she wanted was for him to attach those memories to the children, but simply taking the children away wasn’t an option. He was slowly, gradually, re-learning how to interact with other adults without all the steel walls and barbed shields he’d built to protect himself, but children were a part of the world, too, and even if they never had any together, even if they gave Chibi back to Alibert and they never went to Emrub, he couldn’t hide from them forever.

The solution she hit on was a simple one. In a market in Bonta she found an elegant golden hair clasp and handfuls of green and gold beads, and then all she had to do was curl up behind him on a couch while he was reading. It wasn’t the first time she’d brushed out his hair like this, and he relaxed into her touch. When she began separating out thin sections into braids and weaving beads into them, though, he stopped reading and tilted his head back to look at her.

“Am I not pretty enough for you?” he asked, and though his voice was light and teasing, the memories around him were anything but _(golden-haired blue-eyed children laughing at him, a tense awareness of his own tiny size in a sea of broad-shouldered warriors, women’s eyes sliding over him in favor of his golden brother)_.

So she answered, “I’d have gone with ‘stunningly handsome’, myself. And this is a surprise, so finish your book and you’ll see what I’m up to when I’m done.”

He eyed her for a moment, skepticism in his green eyes, but then his curiosity won out over his past. He snorted and went back to reading, though she caught him using their reflection in the glass of the table lamp to sneak peeks. Finally she knotted off the last braid, then took him by the shoulders and nudged him to a sitting position with his back to her. Curiosity spilled off him in waves, but he let her do it, sat patiently while she gathered back all of his wild dark hair and fastened it with the gold clasp.

When she’d finished, she pulled a small mirror from a pocket and handed it to him. “What do you think?” she asked, and couldn’t quite keep the hope out of her voice.

He was silent for a long time, turning his head this way and that as he studied himself in the mirror, his free hand coming up to touch the beads, the braids, the clasp. She thought he looked breathtaking, the beads flashing against the darkness of his hair, his cheekbones standing out in stark elegance without his hair to mask them, a single escaped curl brushing his forehead. She couldn’t read the thoughts dancing around him, too fast and tangled to grasp, but she caught flickers of an odd sort of confusion, as if he was seeing himself for the first time.

Finally he nodded, small and slight and mostly to himself. He set the mirror on the side table. “It looks different,” he said. “...I could get used to it, I think.”

“Good,” she said, and kissed him.

*             *             *

After that, he did much better with the children. She waited months before bringing up once again the idea of them having a child together, and this time, the idea didn’t seem to scare him quite so badly. In fact, once they’d agreed on it and started trying in earnest, she was surprised to find that she was more nervous than he was. The responsibility of being the only Eliatrope who could bear children - at least until the inhabitants of Emrub could return to the world once again and grow to child-bearing age - weighed on her. It was made worse by the fact that she didn’t know what would come of an Eliatrope having a child with a shapeshifting Jotun, a worry she also saw flitting around Loki on occasion. But he didn’t mention it, perhaps not wanting to add to her fears, and neither did she want to give it the weight, the reality, that would come from talking about it.

It was almost two and a half years after the Infinity War, and the situation with New Sufokia had settled into a tense stalemate while the various parties held meeting after meeting, when she began to feel strange. At first she put it down to the prolonged strain of dealing with the Sufokians as well as raising three-year-old twins, but then, a few days before the Council of Twelve was set to convene, she woke up so nauseous she barely made it to the bathroom before emptying her stomach. When she had nothing left in her to throw up, she sagged against the wall and rested for a few minutes, mostly glad that Loki had gone to Bonta with Joris yesterday because otherwise he’d be fussing over her, and worrying that if she was falling ill then maybe they should be more careful, hold off on trying for a while because being sick would be bad for—

_Oh_.

She closed her eyes, focused her mind on the flow of wakfu through her body. She almost missed it, tiny and barely-formed as it was, but sure enough there was a delicate ball of wakfu that didn’t quite belong to her. Panic fluttered through her, and it was several minutes before she could calm down enough to stand, to clean up and get dressed and go find Evangelyne. Eva, who had gone through all this once already, took her down to the healers’ wing and the Eniripsas. They studied her, wands glowing with gentle wakfu, and finally they confirmed what she’d already known.

She wanted, desperately, to tell him, but he wouldn’t return from Bonta until the morning of the Council meeting when he rode in with Joris and the Bontarian noblemen, and besides, he needed all his attention for the negotiations. So she waited, and thought of a hundred different ways to tell him, and it was fortunate that when he finally arrived from Bonta they had only long enough for her to give him a kiss and hand him Chibi so that she could greet the Pandawa matriarch at King Sheran Sharm’s request, because otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to keep from saying anything.

But the Council of Twelve was successful, as such councils went; no one attacked anyone and they even managed to agree on enough motions to move the negotiations with the New Sufokians to the next stage. When it was finally over, guests tended and niceties performed and social duties discharged, she retreated to their room to find Loki already slumped on a couch.

He looked up when she entered, and they spoke at the same time: “I need to tell you something.”

She blinked, started, but managed to beat him to saying, “You first.” She couldn’t fathom what he wanted to say, feared he’d changed his mind, feared something had come up, and she wanted to know before she told him.

For a moment he seemed about to argue, but then he licked his lips and looked away. “I went to Asgard this morning,” he said, his voice carefully neutral. “It was too busy here. I needed someplace quiet.”

“All right,” she said. She sat beside him on the couch, tucking one leg under her so she could face him fully.

He hesitated. “I saw Moth—Frigga. And Odin. Thor took Chibi to see them, I didn’t know he was going to, I wasn’t expecting it—” _(memories of a hedge garden, Frigga holding Chibi’s hand, the sharp awful fear at seeing Odin again_ ). He swallowed hard. “Frigga invited us to dinner in the palace next week. I accepted.”

_Oh_.

Words spilled out of him, panicked and desperate: “I don’t know why, I shouldn’t, I don’t—don’t think I can, I-I-I should never have - have accepted, I can’t—”

Her fear didn’t matter anymore. He needed this now, because his thoughts were stuck in a past he hated, a past he couldn’t control, couldn’t fix, and he needed to look to the future instead. So she took his hand; waited for his words to run dry. When he fell silent, green eyes searching her face, she said gently, “I’m pregnant.”

“...Oh,” he said. The panicked thoughts around him burst in little surprised puffs and vanished; it was several long minutes before he gathered himself enough to even close his mouth. She waited, swallowing back her fear, because right now he needed her to be strong. Finally he said, very quietly, “So… we’re going to have dinner in Asgard next week, aren’t we.”

“I think it would be a good thing,” she answered.

“A good thing,” he echoed. His green eyes were still fixed on hers, and now they sharpened to a fierce protectiveness. He tugged her closer, wrapping his arms around her, and she buried her face against his neck. Into her hair he whispered, “This is a good thing, Jahanna.”

She didn’t trust herself to speak, so she clung more tightly to him and nodded.

*             *             *

She was glad Thor was there when Hade was born. Thor was doing his part, learning how to be the brother Loki needed; now it was on Loki to realize it, to set aside the past, to accept that the Thor who stood beside him now was no longer the careless, callous youth he remembered. She wanted to encourage that, but moreover having Thor there meant she could send Loki away when his hovering protectiveness got to be too much. Tikalukatal already refused to leave her side, still badly rattled from having shared the birthing experience with her through their bond, and both of them would have been unbearable.

Still, Loki was there for her when she had her first moment of panic, after she’d returned to their rooms with Hade swaddled in her arms and realized that this tiny child depended on her for everything. He was there when she broke down and cried in frustration the fifth time Hade woke them up screaming hungrily; he was there when the leftover pains of birth overwhelmed her and she couldn’t bring herself to move; he was there when she felt the first intense moment of peace, curled on the bed against his side with Hade cradled to her breast.

And she could feel the peace in him, too, the knots and cracks in his wakfu easing with his brother’s presence. She couldn’t be everything to him, and though Tikalukatal considered him a brother, dragons did not interact with the world as mortals - or Aesir - did. He had friends here in the Sadida Kingdom, Eva and Tristepin and Yugo and Amalia and Armand and more, but Thor had been his friend, his brother, for centuries longer than any of them had even been alive. And even if he was still wary, if he still held himself cautiously around Thor for fear of being rejected yet again, there was an ease to their interactions that she could tell he’d desperately missed. He smiled more, the small true smile that she’d only seen a few times in the years they’d been together, and she was glad to see it.

When the time came to travel to Asgard, to formally present Hade to the throne and begin the ceremonies to baptize him into the line of succession, she was exhausted and cranky and snappish, but Loki only smiled at her. She could see his nervousness, a bright thread that sparked around him _(memories of the golden city in ruins, of hanging from the rainbow bridge while Odin tore his heart from his chest, of standing in the wrecked throne room after the war while Odin’s words tore him apart once more_ ), but there was happiness as well, a quiet fierce pride in Hade, in _her_. And even as he drew strength from his newfound ease with his brother, she drew strength from that quiet pride.

He was her rock, her foundation, as much as she was his, but where she’d always had Tikalukatal to balance her, he was only just starting to realize that he had Thor once again. And with his brother by his side, he was closer to whole than she’d ever seen him. Not entirely whole, not yet, possibly not for a long time - the wounds he’d suffered at the hands of the Chitauri, and those dealt him by people he’d once thought were friends, were family, had left him deeply scarred. But he was trying.

And with every scar that healed, every painful memory that faded and vanished, that rare real smile came out more. 


End file.
